No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction.
If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt's wide-ranging ambition.
None has written so well both of Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion.